Online forums such as reddit and comment sections for online articles allow users to converse with one another through the posting of comments in comment threads.
Constructive dialogues in such forums and comment sections tend to increase user engagement with the service hosting the forum or publishing the article, whereas dialogues that are not constructive tend to have the opposite effect.
Determining whether a dialogue is constructive or not is usually not necessarily a difficult task for a literate human. However, it has proven to be a difficult task to automate, at least in part because of the “comment-centric” approaches adopted by most researchers.
Consequently “dialogue-centric” approaches to the automation of this task remain an active area of research and experimentation.